


if you ran away (come back home)

by callieincali



Series: Kady's POV [5]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/F, lowkey a character study, post S1, read this if you think kady orloff-diaz deserves the world, wickoff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-29 01:03:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15061658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callieincali/pseuds/callieincali
Summary: kady doesn’t know if julia is alive anymore





	if you ran away (come back home)

**Author's Note:**

> long time no see, here’s a short fic to maybe make up for that,,,
> 
> enjoy!
> 
> lowkey inspired by ‘where’s my love’ by SYML, hence the title

Kady didn’t know if Julia was alive anymore.

It had been a month since she last saw the girl— since she ran from underneath the living room’s end table and left the trickster god alone with Julia, no chance of anyone coming back to rescue her. 

She liked to think Reynard spared her, that maybe he took what he wanted and left her battered and broken, but alive. She liked to think maybe one day they’d find each other again— run into each other at a coffee shop and reconnect over some lattes. Maybe Julia wouldn’t be as angry as she deserved to be at Kady’s cowardice. Maybe she’d pull Kady close and tell her she forgave her, and that it was time for her to do the same.

It had been a month since Kady promised herself she would circle back to Julia’s apartment with the calvary to take down the monster they’d summoned, and also a month since she hailed a cab and told them to drive her as far as her credit card would allow. And when the driver finally kicked her out, she walked in the darkness of the night until she stumbled upon some abandoned warehouse, still shaking from the earlier events, and bought the first drug she could find being sold to make her forget as much as possible.

She cast a quick spell to turn their ten dollar bills to hundreds as a payment. They gave her what she wanted, either out of gratitude or fear.

It had been a month of that same routine until her presence was fairly well-known in the area. Turning tricks, she called it. Small spells— just enough to draw some attention. They paid her in whatever she wanted.

A month of pumping her body full of heroin with the hopes it would make her forget. A month of seeing blood pooling on hardwood every time she closed her eyes. 

Julia probably wasn’t alive anymore, and the thought left a gaping hole in her chest that no amount of drugs could fill.

Kady was walking the downtown streets, not even aware she had started in the direction of Julia’s apartment, her mind reeling with too many emotions to sort through. She still felt tired and mildly numb from her last dose, but craved another fix to strengthen the sensation.

Julia had probably been dead for a month, was the loudest thought in her mind, repeating itself over and over until Kady felt tears sting her eyes and threaten to spill down her cheeks.

She should have gone back long ago, could have gone back any day in the last thirty that had passed, but feared what she would find waiting for her. And even if she did return to find Julia alive, she could never face the girl she’d practically left to die with the knowledge no one else would save her in Kady’s absence.

Every day made the guilt stronger, and every day acted as another reason why Kady couldn’t let herself go back.

But she found herself standing on the edge of the broken city sidewalk nonetheless, waiting for the first available cab to flag down.

Had she been any more sober, she would have refrained, but her thoughts refused to stray from the image of a certain wavy-haired brunette, and she figured if she didn’t do something to remedy it, she’d probably end up doing something stupider.

She robbed an ATM to pocket some cash for the trip, feeling a familiar pit of guilt settling in her stomach as the bills flew from below the area labeled ‘cash’.

It wasn’t that she’d grown averse to stealing— she couldn’t care less about the moral end of the action— but more about the way magic left a sour taste in her mouth whenever she used it, like an unpleasant reminder that magic was responsible for her current state and just how shitty her life had become.

She had always promised herself she wouldn’t let magic do to her what it did to her mom— and sometimes she thought she was on the path to ensuring that. But catching her reflection in the screen of the ATM she had just stolen from using the first real spell her mother ever taught her, Kady couldn’t stop herself from feeling like, somehow along the way, she’d taken a wrong turn and ended up following the exact same pattern she told herself she would never be dragged into.

She only used magic when necessary, and even then, it was enough to set her on edge.

A taxi found her eventually, pulling off to the side and motioning for Kady to get in. Her heart drummed loudly in her ears as she closed the yellow checkered door behind her, calling out an address so familiar it twisted her stomach into knots.

It’d been a month and Kady felt no less unsettled by the events that had taken place the last time she’d been to Julia’s apartment. She bounced her leg nervously in the backseat of the car just to stop herself from beginning to shake.

She told herself that whatever she found, it’d be better than the constant unknown that plagued her thoughts. The affirmation didn’t ease the worry building inside her. Because whatever she did find was final. There would be no doubt left. If Julia hadn’t survived, she would know once and for all, and the security blanket of assuming the girl might still be out there would he ripped from her grasp.

She wasn’t ready to know, but couldn’t stand to wonder any longer.

It was an hour drive to Julia’s side of town— an hour filled with constant second guessing and near abandonment of the plan altogether, but she clamped her teeth on her tongue each time her feet grew cold and only allowed herself to speak as the driver pulled up beside the apartment complex that sent her head spinning and her eyes blurring with tears. She managed a ‘thanks’ and a ‘keep the change’ before stepping from the vehicle and steadying her weak legs on a telephone pole beside her.

Part of her was thankful she wasn’t all the way sober— she probably would have been a mess without the crutch of heroin still fresh in her system.

She stared at the entrance of the building from afar for a while, the reason unbeknownst to even herself. The brick walls were all too familiar— and that was the problem, she supposed: everything was too familiar and it made all the events she worked so hard to suppress bubble up inside her until they spilled over and drowned her thoughts in vivid details that hadn’t surfaced in weeks.

Kady pushed from the telephone pole and started forward, each step slower and more intimidating than the last.

The answer to the question looming like a dark cloud was so close she could practically touch it, and that scared the hell out of her.

Her hand met the front door handle and she thought again about leaving— letting herself live in vaguely blissful ignorance for just a little while longer. It was always ‘just a little while longer’, though. And that was how ‘going to find backup’ turned to a month living in a warehouse, and how a month would soon turn to a year if something didn’t change.

She knew the way to Julia’s apartment like second nature. She’d made the walk plenty of times, many of which while holding stacks of grocery bags or supplies for spells. So, she could quite literally say she knew the way there with her eyes closed. 

Up the stairs, third door on the right.

Kady felt strikingly sober at the top of the steps, any numbness holding back her emotions fading into nothingness. It was terrifyingly vulnerable to stand outside Julia’s apartment door, no drug-induced high to lessen the tension growing inside her.

The buzz of magic emanated from the walls in front of her— wards she had long since memorized, but staring at them now, only recognized as some foreign language, too complicated for her muddled mind to decipher. 

She settled for doing things the old-fashioned way and brought a shaky fist to the door, tapping loudly twice and clenching her hand absentmindedly a few times at her side. Cool air conditioning swept over her face and drew attention to the wetness streaking down her cheeks. She hurriedly wiped the tears away with her arm and cleared her throat, desperate for some way to regain her composure.

A minute passed without a response, so Kady tried the doorknob. It didn’t budge, and the wards buzzed in protest at the contact. She pounded her fist against the wood again, loud enough to vibrate through the walls. “Julia,” she called out, unaware she had even begun to speak. Her throat felt dry and scratchy, the lump growing in it doing nothing to assist in her attempts to get the attention of whoever was on the other side of the door, if anyone. 

It was five minutes later when a door did open— two apartments down the hall— and revealed a young man behind it, a look of bewilderment twisting his features.

“Are you lost?” He asked, one hand still on his doorknob as if Kady was going to lunge at any second and force him to retreat. She shook her head with a dry laugh, one that couldn’t fool anyone into believing it was genuine.

“No, not at all,” she mumbled, turning in defeat and letting her back find support on the wall behind her. “Just looking. For a friend.”

“The girl that used to live there— Julia, right?” Kady’s interest piqued at that, every hair on her arms raising at the possibility of what would follow the question. She forced herself to be immediately skeptical; she had just called out the girl’s name and the man could have easily overheard it. But the notion that he might know something made that skepticism feel distant and weak.

“Used to?” Her voice broke as she said it despite the cool exterior she pushed herself to hold, and her chest grew tight at the implication of the words. The man pursed his lips for a long moment before sighing.

“Yeah, I haven’t seen her around at all lately. Not that I saw her much before. But she used to have friends over sometimes. Not anymore, though. Haven’t seen that door open at all in— probably a month.” He took a cautious few steps from where he stood protectively behind his door frame, but his hand refused to move from the handle.

Kady let the words bounce through her head, struggling to place a meaning to them other than the obvious one that rung loudly at the forefront of her thoughts. She swallowed hard, pushing messy curls from in front of her eyes and trying not to allow her knees to collapse underneath her from the weight of it all.

“Thanks,” she all but growled, hoping to portray her intent for the conversation to end there. A flicker of some emotion— probably fear— crossed his expression before he nodded shortly and withdrew back inside the safety of his home, letting the door pull shut behind him. Kady slid her back down the wall until she was sitting, burying her face in her hands and scrubbing at her tired eyes.

The tears didn’t come, and she figured that was primarily because she expected this outcome over all others— the outcome where Julia’s death was strongly suggested, but somewhere deep, down inside her still chose to believe there was a chance she was out there.

Kady wouldn’t believe it until the evidence was blatantly in front of her, and she figured that was the most frustrating part of it all. There was no proof to find at Julia’s apartment, and part of her knew that all along.

Sure, she could have trudged her way to some morgue or other and found out once and for all, but there was still _something_ there— she dared to call it self-sabotage— preventing her from wanting to move on, wanting to forget, wanting to seek closure.

Maybe it was the ease of not having to deal with the finality of the answer she would find. There was comfort in the unknown, and if Kady knew one thing about herself, it was that she didn’t do well outside of her comfort zone.

And sitting against the wall of Julia’s apartment, feeling the mild vibration of the wards against her back, she knew she had long surpassed comfort, and the racing of her heart easily proved that. The hallways were completely empty, but that didn’t stop an overwhelming sense of vulnerability and exposure from activating the fight-or-flight response inside her. She wanted to go home, wherever that was. She wanted to go to some house and drink until her vision blurred, and then shoot up until sleeping the day and night away with a faintly peaceful numbness was inevitable. 

Kady pushed from the wall and cleared her throat again, letting her eyes catch once more on the sight of Julia’s front door. It struck her for a brief moment that she was standing in front of the place she probably considered ‘home’, but she was walking down the hall before she could dwell on it, her body somehow more numb than when she had walked in. Not from drugs this time, but from a hollow emptiness enveloping her.

She hailed another cab from the sidewalk and gave him the street name she’d been dropped off at a month before. An eery sense of déjà vu set in, the scene feeling all to familiar, minus the intense fear and shock that followed her into the taxi last time. She leaned her head against the window and dozed off some time after, only waking when the driver announced they had arrived.

It was mid-afternoon by then, and Kady had gone what she considered to be far too long between her last dose. She found a rundown warehouse, one she’d frequented in the past weeks, and paid the nearest, mostly coherent, dealer for a fix, finding a unoccupied mattress to lie on.

It was no more than ten minutes before the room grew dark around Kady, the desired result setting in and clearing her mind of just about everything consuming it. She couldn’t remember how much she’d taken— most likely too much— but it wasn’t enough to stop the image of Julia from slipping past the drug’s effects.

And Julia was probably dead, Kady knew that. She always had.

She let her eyes fall shut, hoping to something unknown that the guilt the knowledge brought along with it would ease with time.

The tears that unexpectedly slipped past her eyes as she let sleep take over told her that was wishful thinking.

**Author's Note:**

> aaaand insert the events of 2x04 right after this, just for a little added angst (:
> 
> i’m @magicianstextposts on tumblr if you guys wanna send some requests my way, or @bestbltches on twitter if you wanna come yell or smth
> 
> comments and kudos are happily accepted and greatly appreciated!


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